CreditLoan Maps Out Obama’s Economic Stimulus Plan

Topic

President Barack Obama has a $800 billion+ economic stimulus package in the works. That’s a lot of dough. Where’s it all going? CreditLoan provides the breakdown in bubbles, bubbles, and more bubbles. Fill color indicates what the money will be used for (e.g. tax cuts, human capital) and border color shows where the money goes to (e.g. government, people, business).

The information is organized nicely and the graphic is attractive, but it probably needs a good bit of fact checking. Some quick calculator work indicates a lot of the numbers don’t add up right. I’m sure there are some rounding errors, but there are some pretty big discrepancies. Ideas anyone? I don’t have the patience to go through all the comments on the original post to find out, but I suggest you take the graphic with a grain of salt.

This graphic would be better if the sizes of the bubbles were consistent. For example, the $244 billion bubble is bigger than the $351 billion bubble. Also, the scaling of the bubbles is off. Part of this is because it’s difficult to judge the area of a circle and part of it is that the scaling is not accurate.